Freight is steady. Speculation is not.

Finding cargo to haul, by destination world.

Starships generate revenue four ways — carrying passengers, cargo, mail and charters — and the first two start at the same table. For any given destination world, roll on the Available Freight And Passengers table to find out what there is to carry.

One table serves both cargo and berths, and the two are rolled together. If you wish, work out how much freight and how many passengers there are for every destination you could reach, and then choose where to go based on which is worth the most.

Delivery has a convention that decides when you get paid. Goods taken on in orbit are delivered when they are placed in orbit around the destination; goods taken on at a planetary surface are delivered when they are off-loaded on the surface of the destination world. That applies to cargo, passengers and mail alike, so a ship that never lands has not finished a surface contract.

Large lots, and the rate they pay.

Ships commonly pay their way by transporting cargo in bulk. This is on a flat-fee basis per ton of cargo: your accounts are credited with Cr1,000 per ton, upon delivery.

Bulk freight revenue

Cr1,000 per ton of cargo, credited upon delivery

If nothing worth carrying is available you may remain in port and see whether new cargoes present themselves — roll again every three days. Passengers have to be determined at the same time as cargo, though: if you sit in port waiting for freight, the passengers will find another ship, and if you wait for passengers the freight goes out on somebody else’s hull.

A ship without the capacity to carry all the available freight or passengers can take some of what is there, up to its total capacity. There is no penalty for leaving cargo behind beyond the money you did not earn.

Selling berths, by class, and what each pays.

Selling berths works like selling hold space. Roll on the Available Freight And Passengers table for how many passengers of each class there are, take as many as you can accommodate, and collect the fare for each class — Cr10,000 for a high passage, Cr8,000 for a middle one and Cr1,000 for a low one.

A ship may remain in port to see whether new passengers present themselves, on the same three-day cadence as cargo — and with the same catch, that waiting for passengers loses you the freight and waiting for freight loses you the passengers. They are one decision, not two.

What actually limits a passenger business is not the availability roll but the ship: staterooms you can spare after the crew is housed, low berths you have fitted, and enough Steward skill aboard to look after everyone you sold a ticket to.

Active · completed 2026-08-11T23:14:07Z

Carrying mail, and what qualifies you to.

Merchant ships can pick up mail delivery contracts, usually as an adjunct to a route they already fly. The contract pays Cr25,000 for each trip made — Cr5,000 per ton of postal cargo area — regardless of how much mail is actually carried.

The tonnage carried will not exceed 5 tons per trip. Roll 1D6-1 for how many tons of mail there actually are — and you receive the Cr25,000 whether there is anything to carry or not, which is what makes the contract a floor under your income rather than another cargo.

Actual mail carried on a trip

1D6-1 tons, never more than 5

Reference rule — not active yet

The honorarium for carrying a personal message.

Separately from any contract, ships get approached to carry private messages — sometimes through the owner or captain, sometimes quietly through a crew member. Private mail is usually meant for a specific person at the far end, and it comes with an honorarium of Cr20 to Cr120. Carrying one is also an introduction to the recipient as a dependable, trustworthy person, which is frequently worth more than the money.

Being hired whole, rather than by the ton.

Instead of selling space by the ton and the berth, you can hire the whole ship out. Charters come from commercial and private concerns for all sorts of reasons — private transport, standby cargo capacity for a priority load, special or discreet deliveries.

A starship charter is computed on capacity rather than on use, so an empty hold earns the same as a full one for the duration. The owner pays all the overhead and supplies a crew, which means the charterer is buying the ship’s time and not its staff.

Buying to sell, and the risk in it.

A trader with cargo space available and free capital to speculate with can buy goods on one world and sell them on another. Unlike freight, which pays a flat fee for hauling somebody else’s cargo, this is your money at risk — and for a merchant willing to take that risk it can be a very profitable business.

The shape of it is symmetrical: the first three steps are the buying half and the last two repeat them at the other end, with the price table read in the opposite direction. The fourth step is the part that takes a week and burns fuel, and it is where everything you learned about jump applies.

Finding someone selling what you want.

The first step is simple: find a supplier with something to sell. There are three ways to look, they take different amounts of time, and all three are Average (+0) checks.

You can search for several suppliers rather than settling for the first, but each attempt makes the next one harder: there is a DM−1 per previous attempt on a planet in a given month. Shopping around has a real cost, and it resets when the month does.

What a world has to sell, by trade code.

Goods come in two categories. Common Goods can be purchased on any world. Trade Goods can usually only be found on a world with a matching trade code, which is what makes where you are shopping matter as much as what you are shopping for.

A given supplier has all of the Common Goods available, plus 1D6 randomly determined goods. Roll D66 on the Trade Goods table for each, ignoring results 61 to 65 unless you are dealing with a black market supplier. If the same type of goods comes up more than once, the supplier simply has extra amounts of it.

The Tons column is a real limit rather than decoration: it is how many tons of that type of goods are there to buy. So a hold bigger than the lot on offer means buying several kinds of goods or leaving the space empty.

Some goods are illegal and can only be bought through a black market supplier, who has whatever illegal goods match the world’s trade code as well as any that come up on the random rolls. Other goods are legal on some worlds and not on others — personal weapons and armour, for instance, may be restricted on a world with a high law level — and the referee adjudicates those as they arise.

The check that sets what you pay.

What you pay is decided by a skill check, and the result represents the best offer the two of you can reach under the conditions. Determining the purchase price is a Broker, Intelligence or Social Standing check taking 1D6 kiloseconds at Average (+0), and you read the result off the Purchase column of the Modified Price table.

What the cargo costs you

the Base Price × the Purchase Price percentage from the table

You do not have to accept the price. If you reject the deal, though, you cannot deal with that supplier again for at least one week — after which you may attempt a new skill check for the same goods. Walking away is a real option with a real cost in time.

Paying for help, and what it is worth.

You can hire a local broker to represent you in the negotiation, which lets you use their skill levels instead of your own. It costs a percentage of the final negotiated price — and that commission is owed even if you decide not to sell.

The Notes column does double duty: it is the commission you pay for that skill level and the maximum skill level commonly available at each class of starport. A class D world will not find you a broker above skill 1 however much you are willing to pay.

The better broker is not automatically the better deal. Each level buys you roughly one more point on the check, and each level costs another 5% of the price — so hiring the best broker in a class A port means giving away a fifth of the deal to improve a throw you might have made anyway.

The check that sets what you get.

Selling works just like purchasing, with three changes. You must find a buyer instead of a supplier, and the same rules apply to that search. You add the largest Sale DMs for the world’s trade code and subtract the largest Purchase DMs — the reverse of buying. And you read the Sale column of the Modified Price table rather than the Purchase one.

The reversal is what makes the route matter rather than the cargo. A good with Purchase DMs on an industrial world and Sale DMs on a non-industrial one is cheap at the factory and dear at the frontier — and carrying it the other way loses you money on both ends of the same table.

The Sale column is also more generous at the top than the Purchase column is at the bottom. A very good buying roll takes you to 20% of base; a very good selling roll takes you to 400%. The upside on a speculative cargo is in the sale, which is why traders hunt for the right destination rather than the right bargain.